RPG Appreciation Thread

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I was looking for you around the Palladium booth but I didn't see you. Hope you had a good trip.

Sorry I missed you! Yeah, I had a great time. Unfortunately one of my travel companions got sick so we had to leave at noon on Sunday. I did have my paper minis set up on a table near the Robotech Tactics demos most of the con, several people looked interested.

I just wish I had access to the sales numbers on my products at Drivethrurpg. My editor has them, but he's been putting in 15 hour days 7 days a week and hasn't had a minute to let me know how they're doing.

Think I left about the same time for my flight. I think I saw them there. Hope they are doing well for you.

So do I. I've got two more sets ready to go, a Great Horned Dragon almost figured out and another two sets in the works. Now I just have to wait for the editor to get back from China to bug him about the numbers..

This isn't a finished render by far and I'm really not happy with the background, but I had to throw some things around it to get the reflections going.

Kitbashed a RIFTS Glitterboy Power Armor, which is coated with a laser-resistant chrome armor. The body itself is cobbled together from various robots and armor (and Genesis), but the Boom Gun is almost entirely made from Davo parts, using FVCS, GVCS, The Backpack Construction Set and SFCS II.

Next year is the 25th anniversary of the RIFTS RPG. As part of the celebration, Kev has assigned the cover of The Rifter #69 (Palladium's quarterly fan submission book) and asked for something RIFTS.

I wanted to do an homage to the feel of the game from back when I was a teenager and bought it upon it's original release, so I put this together.

I rendered it at 10,000 dots high (D|S 4.6's max resolution) so my post-work with Adam Wright's Toon Actions would get the highest detail before shrinking it down and I'm very happy with the end results.

In RIFTS you can play a Dragon Hatchling, hence the dragon with the eye-piece. Next to him is a Glitterboy, laser resistant power armor with a 'boom gun', a railgun that breaks the sound barrier when it's fired. On the Glitterboys shoulder is a Crazy, a person with Mind Over Matter implants in their brain that give them extraordinary physical and psychic abilities, but slowly drive them insane.

In front of the dragon is the most prolific RIFTS wizard, a LeyLine Walker; beside her is a Cyberknight, living by the Knight's code of honor, grafted with cybernetics and able to create psychic swords. Crouching in front of the Cyberknight is a Vagabond, a jack of all trades and master of none. In front of the Glitterboy is a Dogboy in Coalition armor, genetically engineered humanoid dogs, the perfect cannon-fodder soldiers.

In front of the Dogboy is a Juicer. An implanted bio-computer regulates the chemicals injected throughout the body, turning the Juicer into a super-soldier. The power is incredible, but the process shortens the Juicers lifespan to a mere 4-6 years after conversion.

Lastly on the right we have a full conversion Cyborg with a TX-500 Borg Railgun.

I'm up to five completed sets of paper miniatures for Palladium Fantasy now, (two in the market, three in the que). Right now I'm working on set six, Dwarves! in the end there will be a total of 28, and I think the last seven I do will be female (although I don't do bearded ladies..).

All the paper mini projects have left me itching for more, so I've gotten approval to do paper miniatures for the RIFTS RPG. I'll do these in smaller sets (12-14) for a reduced price point (probably $2.99 a package). I'm already done with the first set, Adventurers Vol. 1, and am working on sets 2 and 3, Deadboys: Old Style and Mark II.

...those are really nice. I always preferred paper miniatures (remember the old "Cardboard Heroes" sets?) as you didn't have to paint them and as a GM, I could get a lot of of "grunts" and bad guys to throw at the players without going bankrupt buying (at that time) lead miniatures or having to resort to cheesy tactics like using pennies or dice as markers.

Always wanted to do a couple of my characters this way but at the time wasn't into 3D and didn't have a colour printer.

...those are really nice. I always preferred paper miniatures (remember the old "Cardboard Heroes" sets?) as you didn't have to paint them and as a GM, I could get a lot of of "grunts" and bad guys to throw at the players without going bankrupt buying (at that time) lead miniatures or having to resort to cheesy tactics like using pennies or dice as markers.

Always wanted to do a couple of my characters this way but at the time wasn't into 3D and didn't have a colour printer.

Thanks.

Yeah, the Cardboard Warriors by Steve Jackson Games were my original inspiration for this product. DrivethruRPG.com has tons of paper minis to choose from but none really met my personal standards.

Whenever I do character portrait commissions for someone I provide a paper mini version too. I've created a light and camera set in D|S 4.6 and a series of Photoshop Actions for post-work that takes me from a finished character design to a full paper mini in about 5 minutes.

Here's some images I took of the finished products at GenCon. Use the next button to see the rest of the nine images after this first one.

For best results, I render characters that are 6ft or under at 2700x3450 (9x11.5), and characters between 6ft and 8ft at 2700x4200 (9x14). there's a decent height ruler I use to scale the figures HERE.

At the specs I listed above it usually doesn't take 20 seconds to render a character portrait on a white background. When I do commissions of full images like the RIFTER cover I showed a few posts above, I render at 10,000 pixels on the long side (the max possible for DazStudio). The reason for this is the post work process I do in Photoshop provides a much crisper outlining at higher resolutions. I always downsize after the post work to whatever size I need.

...hmmm I was under the impression you had a large 32 GB or even 64 GB system.

I have since moved from the old 32 bit notebook I had to a full tower workstation build a couple years ago with a 2.8GHz i7 12 GB DDR3 13 memory in tri-channel mode and an Nvidia GTX 460 with 1GB GDDR5 so I guess I should be fine then.

Never pushed past the 1600 x 1200 size as the full scenes I create are rather involved and it takes a good part of the evening to render in 3DL since I use a lot of "in render' effects like volumetrics.

I'll have to try a render test at that size with just a single character and a blank background. Does the background need to be white or can it be transparent?